Digital Narratives During the Pandemic: TV Series, Social Media, and Conversations on the Internet

The situation of lockdown experienced during the months from March to June 2020 changed the daily lives of people in Spain and their leisure circumstances. This study analyses the narrative representations that people construct when they watched streaming TV series, during the covid-19 pandemic. To access these representations, the Spanish texts that appear on the Internet are analysed, including social networks and other social media. The paper adopts quantitative approaches that use big data analysis complemented with other qualitative approaches and inspired by content and discourse analysis. Findings show that these narrative representations constructed through conversations are on three levels in which context is revealed: first, institutional and community; second, online or offline interpersonal relationships which mention people as facts or as aspirations of their daily lives; and third, personal lives in the reconstruction of the series, projected on the plot reconstruction and the identity of the actors.

Configuration and Emplotment: Converging or Opposite Paradigms for Storytelling?

Reflecting on Paul Ricoeur's discussion of historical configuration and fictional emplotment, this article proposes to actualize his model to oppose two prototypes of narrativity, which form two poles between which narrative representations extend. Instead of basing these prototypes on narrative genres such as historiography and fiction, it compares the configuration of narratives designed to inform readers about the signification of a past event with the emplotment of narratives aiming to immerse readers in a simulated past or a fictive storyworld. While contemporary narratology has been mostly concerned with the latter case, we will see that a comparison between narratives belonging to these two poles can help us better understand the functioning of narrative texts, most of them situated between these two extremes. Drawing on stories of a plane crash found in daily newspapers and magazines, the article shows that news stories usually favor the informative function, but when an event cannot be fully told, information enters a process of serialization, leading to the emergence of a “natural” plot. This leads to the conclusion that artificial emplotment is an imitation of prefiguration rather than the triumph of concordance.

Exploring Cath Maige Tuired through the Concept of Hybridity

This chapter examines the contemporary Irish identity and social reactions to the process of cultural hybridization, as they are depicted in the late Viking-Age narrative Cath Maige Tuired. The tale is a product of a transitional era whose preoccupations and prejudices are reflected in the narrative representations of the Fomoiri and the Tuatha Dé Danann. This chapter considers Cath Maige Tuired within its historical context as a narrative of hybridity in which the pivotal cultural identities are built on an ongoing comparison between the tale’s representations of the Self and the Other. At the same time the narrative illustrates a number of other cultural concerns at the forefront of the collective intellectual consciousness.

Fictional and Non-fictional Narrative Representations of State Repression and Terror in the Dirty Wars in Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990)

I argue that fictional representations of the Dirty Wars in Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990) allow for the possibility of forgiveness and healing, while non-fictional representations such as testimonies and conversations do not. Focusing on a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts, I analyze why and how state repression inflicts trauma and violence upon its victims and survivors. The novels I analyze are no place for heroes by Laura Restrepo, El Angel’s Last Conquest by Elvira Orphée and Bedside manners by Luisa Valenzuela. The non–fictional works I analyze are Nunca Mas: A Report By Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People, That Inferno: Conversations of Five Women Survivors of an Argentine Torture Camp, Circle Over Death: Testimonies of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and We, Chile: Personal Testimonies of the Chilean Arpilleristas. The theoretical underpinnings of my arguments are Paul Ricouer’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) and Avishai Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory (2002), both of which attempt to think through the relationship between forgetting and forgiving.

Remembering Materiality: A Material–Relational Approach to Organizational Memory

In this paper, we develop a material–relational approach to understanding organizational memory. We focus on the inherent materiality of mnemonic devices—material artifacts that anchor shared memories of the past. Mnemonic devices work to constitute social groups of organizational stakeholders bound together by mutual affinities to these devices, known as mnemonic communities. While we know that the materiality of mnemonic devices represents information about the past that is interpreted by members of the mnemonic community as a narrative that is important in the present, our approach focuses on how engagement with the material aspects of mnemonic devices can create relationships of affinity among people remembering together. To develop our conceptualization, we first apply insights from the literature on materiality and its emphasis on how materiality is the basis for non-verbal and relational communication. From this, we theorize four material attributes that affect how mnemonic devices constitute relational connections that create embodied, cartographic, and temporal boundaries for organizational mnemonic communities. We then conceptualize how these distinct material attributes accumulate, intersect, and interact with each other and with the narrative representations of mnemonic devices and how in turn these interactions may bind stakeholders together. By emphasizing the material–relational aspect of mnemonic devices, our paper theorizes a broader and potentially more powerful set of affinities between stakeholders and organizations and, on this basis, enhances extant research by articulating different paths to the emergence of mnemonic communities.

Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories

Autoethnography covers a wide range of narrative representations, thereby bridging the gap of the boundaries by expressing autoethnographers’ painful and gainful lived experiences. These representations arise from local stories, vignettes, dialogues, and role plays by unfolding action, reaction, and interaction in the form of self-narration. Likewise, the autoethnographic texts must exhibit the autoethnographers’ critical reflections on the overall process of the inquiry. These exhibitions shall alert the autoethnographers’ research ethics, reflexivity, alternative modes of representation, inquiry, and storytelling. The original articles in this issue that rises from the domain of critical social theories within the various ranges of theoretical perspectives include journeying through informing, reforming, and transforming teacher education; critical ethnographic research tradition; a critical and political reading of the excerpts of myths; climate change education and its interface with indigenous knowledge and general traits of the participants as transformed teachers.

Enhancing the tellability of death-row exoneree narratives: Exploring the role of rhetoric

Individuals make sense of experience through telling stories they hope others will hear. To establish an interpretive connection with their audience, narrators must tell stories that are tellable, conceptualized as engaging but not too socially or emotionally challenging. We analyze the narratives of death-sentenced exoneree activists. When depicting their wrongful convictions, we find exoneree activists convey accepted critiques of criminal justice system processing through familiar tropes that reinforce shared understanding with their audience. When representing their unique suffering and conveying a more critical perspective, exonerees marshal sarcasm, metaphor, and litotes. These rhetorical devices convey irony that encourages listeners to question their assumptions, thereby, enhancing audience receptivity to exonerees’ perspectives. We consider the broader significance of figurative language in narrative representations of justice-system involvement.

Narrative Self-Representations of Socially Oriented Expectations of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

The article examines the theoretical and methodological foundations and empirical implementation of the approach to the study of narrative self-representations in the field of socially oriented expectations of young and adult persons with intellectual disabilities. Socially oriented expectations largely determine the behavioral representations of the subject in relation to the outside world and other people. There are no special methods for studying the socially oriented expectations of adults with intellectual disabilities, in connection with which an approach can be proposed using the content analysis of narrative representations obtained in the framework of the study of socially oriented personality self-structures (social self). In this case, the coding is based on two parameters: the frequency of occurrence of representative references and the emotional orientation of representative references to socially oriented expectations. With the use of latent coding, based on the semantic analysis of speech units and representative references, it becomes possible to distinguish semantic clusters describing areas of life for which respondents have socially oriented expectations of a particular emotional orientation. This approach makes it possible to overcome the difficulties of analyzing the verbal production of persons with intellectual disabilities, arising in connection with the presence of systemic speech underdevelopment in the latter. The high values of the coefficient of agreement of expert opinions obtained in this study indicate the relevance of the proposed method for obtaining reliable data. The quantitative ratio of the narrative representations of socially oriented expectations between adolescence and adulthood changes insignificantly, there is a qualitative redistribution of the inter-thematic semantic load, as well as a change in the emotional component of the narrative representations of socially oriented expectations of persons with mild intellectual disabilities.